Supreme Court of Kansas, 2015

The court held that the statutory limits on probation duration did not apply to felony domestic battery because that offense is a nongrid felony outside the statute's specified scope.

The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed Marquis Marshall's capital murder conviction for the 2012 shooting deaths of two people inside a Wichita Dollar General store. The court held the district court did not abuse its discretion by declining to order a sua sponte competency evaluation because the record raised no bona fide…

The court affirmed Sprague's conviction for premeditated first-degree murder, rejecting challenges concerning jury unanimity, ineffective assistance, prosecutorial misconduct, corpus delicti, sufficiency of the evidence, evidentiary preservation, search-warrant scope, and cumulative error.

The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed Keel's convictions for possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia, concluding the State presented sufficient evidence of constructive possession and that the drug-paraphernalia jury instructions, read as a whole, were not clearly erroneous. Treating his motion under K.S.A.

The court held that AFLAC failed to establish the foundation required to admit Wiles's hospital toxicology report and that the report was also properly excluded under the business-records exception because its preparation was not sufficiently trustworthy.

The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed Godfrey's convictions and sentence without reaching the merits of his sole appellate claim — that the State breached the plea agreement by merely recommending, rather than seeking, his placement at Larned State Hospital, in violation of his due process rights.

The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals' decision vacating Jeff Dickey's 16-month prison sentence for theft and remanded for resentencing. It held that a legal challenge to the classification of a prior conviction for criminal history purposes may be raised for the first time on appeal under K.S.A.

The court held that Kansas's saving statute applies to an eminent domain appeal from an appraisers' award because the governing statute requires the appeal to be docketed and tried as a new civil action.